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These posts come from visits to reservations and urban-Indian communities. Look for my book, "American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion," coming In spring 2018.

Who Called the Sheriff? Pine Ridge Voter Turnout Plummets, then Rebounds

“Voters walking into the polling place would
see the sheriff there and veer off,” said Donna Semans, the Rosebud Sioux field
coordinator for Four Directions voting-rights group. “If I was driving them to
the polls, they’d spot the sheriff’s vehicle out front and tell me, ‘No way.
I’m not going in there.’”

Semans runs Four Directions’ get-out-the-vote,
or GOTV, operation on the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation,
in South Dakota. Since mid-October, her team has transported voters from around
the 2.1-million acre reservation to a polling place in Pine Ridge Village.
There they can register and cast a no-excuse absentee ballot ahead of Election
Day.

Then one day, the county sheriff showed
up in the voting office, and the moccasin telegraph started working overtime.
Tribal members warned each other that casting a ballot might be a way to get arrested.
“Word spread like a grass fire,” said Semans. The number of people wanting
rides to the election office dropped from over 100 a day into the teens.

Were the concerns farfetched? Not at all,
said OJ Semans, Donna’s father and co-director of Four Directions. “To us,
there’s a lot of history behind the sight of a white man in a uniform. In South
Dakota, the disparity between Native and non-Native incarceration rates is
extreme. It’s like the Old South, except it’s happening in the 21st
century. And don’t forget the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened near Pine
Ridge Village.”

The problems at the polling place arose during
the week of October 13, when $50,000 in donations to support GOTV from liberal
blog Daily Kos landed on Sioux reservations. Turnout surged. The National
Congress of American Indians and other groups also contributed. The total soon
topped $100,000.

The nation’s eyes had shifted to South
Dakota—and its Native voters, who make up some seven or eight percent of the
state’s electorate, said Greg Lembrich, a New York City attorney who serves as Four Directions legal director. And they’re reliably Democratic. In 2012, 93
percent of Pine Ridge voters choose the Obama-Biden ticket. There are nearly
9,000 registered voters on Pine Ridge and a total of about 35,000 Native voters
when the other eight reservations in the state are counted in. Getting those voters
to the ballot box became a tantalizing goal.

After a kickoff rally in the state
capitol, Pierre, on Native American Day (Columbus Day in the other 49 states),
reservation GOTV operations throughout South Dakota gassed up and hit the road.
Dustina Gill, of Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, a Sioux tribe, drove a bus dubbed the
War Pony to all nine Indian communities in the state to encourage voters to register
and early vote.

On Pine Ridge, Semans hired drivers and
set up a command center in a disused video store in Pine Ridge Village. Oglala
Sioux tribal member Kevin Killer, the area’s representative to the state
legislature, joined her there with a second GOTV group created through his nonpartisan
PAC, NDN Election Efforts. The two operations had as
many as 20 drivers turning
up daily to give friends and neighbors a lift to the polling place.

A big bloc of voters typically sidelined
by isolation and poverty was suddenly on the move.

Until then, no more than five voters a
day had been turning up, according to election official Sue Ganje, who’s from
nearby Fall River County. Counties run elections, but barebones Shannon County,
the non-tribal entity that overlaps much of Pine Ridge, can’t afford to run its
own. So, it contracts with Ganje and other officials from neighboring, mostly white,
Fall River to handle voting.

On October 17, after several days of high
voter turnout in Pine Ridge Village, Ganje requested that the county sheriff,
Jim Daggett, visit the polling place. “I believe I just asked him to pop by periodically
when he was in town, which I have always done in the past, so he just popped
in, I believe,” she said in an interview the following Monday, October 20.

Was she surprised that Native people saw
this as intimidating? In an interview on Pine Ridge, Ganje
responded, “I know that in the past, whenever the sheriff has come, I’ve heard
this, in the past, that it was intimidating to voters. I don’t think he was
doing anything other than popping in.”

When Ganje was asked if she thought Native
people felt welcome in the Pine Ridge Village polling place, she said she “would
always hope so.” She pointed out that she’d hired tribal members as election
workers. “I don’t know what else I can do,” she said.

Ganje added that on one occasion, the sheriff was responding to a complaint of improper voter influence by GOTV workers. In a separate interview, Sheriff Daggett said that when he arrived, “everything was fine.” He explained, “The information was third-hand.”

Complaining of discrimination “under
color of law,” Four Directions contacted state and federal authorities about
the sheriff’s visits. Soon thereafter, U.S. Attorney for South Dakota Brendan Johnson said he was “closely following the matter in conjunction
with the Department of Justice Voting Rights Section.”

Loren Cuny, an Oglala stuntman for
television shows and movies, is one of Semans’s drivers. Part of his work over
the past several days has been convincing fellow tribal members that casting a
ballot is safe. He’s proud of his involvement and his vote. “Voting is
something I do for my people,” he said.

The
storm over the sheriff is not the first time Fall River County has been at loggerheads
with Pine Ridge’s Native electorate. Elections on Pine Ridge were under special
Department of Justice scrutiny until 2013, when the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision struck down the Voting
Rights Act section that provided the mechanism for that. To get the
early-voting office in Pine Ridge Village, tribal members had to fight Fall
River County in federal court. (This year, a second lawsuit against Jackson
County netted a similar polling place in Wanblee, in the reservation’s northwestern corner.)

To forestall additional problems, on
October 31 the Justice Department placed two monitors in the Pine Ridge Village
polling place. On Election Day, they’ll be joined by attorneys from a
poll-watching team Lembrich has gathered. In all, he’ll station 40-some lawyers
and law students from around the country on the state’s reservations.

Killer noted an interesting item on the
ballot this year: a Native candidate for sheriff. “The election itself may
provide a solution to the problems we’ve had this year,” he said.

UPDATE: On November 5, Pine Ridge learned that Daggett’s Native opponent in the election, Rex Conroy, won the post of sheriff with more than 80 percent of the vote.

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I am a long-time writer on human rights and culture, with a focus on Native American issues. Recognition for my articles includes the Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Reporting from the Native American Journalists Association, of which I am an associate (non-Native) member, and numerous other grants and awards from major journalism organizations. I am a contributing writer for publications covering politics and the arts. During two decades in magazines, I was an editor at national consumer magazines.